


Projecting

by orphan_account



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Dream Sex, Drugged Sex, F/M, Humor, Loneliness, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-16
Updated: 2010-11-16
Packaged: 2017-10-13 05:44:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/133626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eames likes to have sex with his projections.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Projecting

Dream Arthur liked men. Or rather, Dream Arthur wasn’t afraid to admit it and act on it, unlike the real one who was at that moment probably engaging in some adorably awkward flirtations with Ariadne and definitely not staring at some hot waiter’s ass. Definitely not.

Maybe Eames had him all wrong, and Arthur really was straight instead of bisexual, and that uptight, oblivious shell was hiding something else. Or not. The important part was now, and right now he really liked Dream Arthur, though especially the part of Dream Arthur that was currently in his mouth. Eames stopped for a moment to savor the moment and stare up at Arthur, whose face went from blanked out bliss to plain annoyance.

“I don’t remember saying you could stop,” Arthur said, rather coldly, grabbing a fistful of Eames’s hair and guiding his head back into place.

Dream Arthur was like the real Arthur: still a bit of a bitch.

-

Eames could still remember what possessed him to start having sex with his projections. The first time had been years ago, right after the first time Arthur had rejected him.

The job had been in Cape Town, stealing the location of a lost will from a particularly unpleasant man’s mind. He’d been cheating his widowed, blind sister out of her inheritance, and he’d probably kicked puppies as well. They’d all been a bit on edge, and then Cobb and Mal had gone off to have some alone time, leaving Eames and Arthur to make their own amusements.

“There’s a bar down the street that apparently serves twelve different fizzy pink drinks,” Eames had said, “and I’m sure they’ll all be perfectly disgusting. Care to come check it out with me?”

Arthur had glanced up from his computer screen for only a moment. “I don’t drink on the job, Mr. Eames.”

And that was that. Eames wondered, had the man even recognized that ‘let’s go get drinks’ was a universally accepted code for ‘let’s get staggeringly drunk and then end up fucking on the floor’, or was that a program that the Arthurbot was not equipped to run? In other words, had it been a rejection of sex, a rejection of friendship, or just a rejection of alcohol, particularly the fizzy pink kind, at that particular moment?

He could have pressed the issue and found out, but Arthurbot had already had his face turned back to the computer screen, the offer seemingly forgotten already, and anyway, Eames had never been fond of rejection. For a minute, he had just stared at Arthur, then had grabbed the PASIV and muttered something vague about practice. He’d locked the door, put himself under and imagined an Arthur who had some normal social awareness.

In his dream, they’d ended up doing it in every room of the flat, while in the real world, Arthur went over data patterns in the next room, completely oblivious.

-

Dream Ariadne was a wildly imaginative lover. It being a dream, Eames wasn’t quite sure how he’d ended up going down on her while also suspended from the central arch of the JK Bridge, but that’s where he found himself. Then, just when his arms were growing numb from the cold, the dream shifted and—

\--he was flat on his back in the well of the double spiral stair in Chambord, with his hands tied above his head and Ariadne riding him violently.

Of course, Ariadne was brilliant, her mind moving a thousand times faster than his could, which is probably why the dream kept shifting so rapidly, and to locations of great architectural significance, no less. If he’d come looking for a better look at her psyche, this dream was a waste.

Might as well enjoy it at least, eh?

He bucked upward with a violence to match hers, savoring the warmth of her along his pelvis and hips, a pleasant contrast to the cold marble of the chateau floor at his back. Hmmm. Chateau. Wasn't Chambord a museum? Shouldn’t there be guards of some sort? Maybe a foot tour coming by any moment now. A glance at Ariadne’s face, with its wicked smile, told him what he needed to know.

“I probably should have expected something like this,” he mused, imagining the slightly nerdy girl he knew and then the dream shifted again—

-

It wasn’t supposed to be creepy, really. He kept it a secret because he knew it was, but he really didn’t mean it to be. He just really liked to poke at people.

Every day, with every glance, his conscious mind absorbed thousands of little quirks, from friends, enemies and strangers. That was part of the reason he was the best in the business.

The thing was that, while his conscious mind performed thousands of acts of mental arithmetic every day, and got that the fashion sense plus efficiency equaled Arthur’s need for control, his unconscious mind performed millions of acts of mental calculus and got that the area under the curve looked quite a bit like Arthur’s rarely seen smile.

So he went under and pulled up projections of his friends and enemies and watched to see what his unconscious mind chose to do with them, and used those elements to get an even deeper read. That was the rest of the reason he was the best in the business.

The sex was just because it was fun.

-

Dream Mal had been sensual and sultry, like a languorous Parisian night. Soft turns and slow caresses on silken sheets, all building to a glorious climax.

And then stillness.

The resumption of motion had always come as a bit of a shock to him, the relaxing of muscles as tension flowed out and their bodies curled together quite naturally. It had only taken the smallest, gentlest motions to set him off again and again.

He didn’t use her anymore, though. It was partly because he missed her and partly because he felt like it would be an intrusion upon Cobb’s grief, but it was mostly because when he was a teenager, his mother had told him that his dead Granny was up in Heaven watching him masturbate. That had, as it was intended to, creeped him the fuck out. He hoped Mal wasn’t up there watching him, and if she was, he hoped she still had her sense of humor.

-

The new job was in Switzerland, which should have made Eames happy, because he loved the wildness of snow-covered mountains.

Instead, it made him a bit lonely and annoyed, because they’d been forced to take up residence in some remote cabin (more like a mansion, really – anything that had more bedrooms than he had fingers on one hand couldn’t really be called a cabin) and his room shared a wall with Ariadne’s.

Every day the team planned and plotted and waited for the snowstorm to end so they could once again break into their mark’s cabin (even more grandiose, if it could be believed) up near the top of the mountain.

Every night, Arthurbot made his way over to Ariadne’s room. It wasn’t that Eames didn’t wish them well; he had all the joy in the world for two awkward nerds finding awkward, nerdy, and probably highly efficient love. It was just that their awkward, nerdy and highly efficient love was also very loud and prone to happen several times a night. (Really, Arthur? Good for you!)

(It really did make sense, though: Arthur probably had decades of repressed sexual urges to work through, and it was most efficient to get a good head start on releasing them.)

He really did wish them all the best and it was all highly informative, but still, a man needed his beauty sleep.

If he’d been a small, jealous man, he’d have joined in their chorus long ago, loudly cooing and moaning for them to hear, possibly to shut them up and possibly to remind them that he could hear them, but mostly just to mess with them. He didn't do that, though. Even if there had never been anything between them (Arthur, you really are too oblivious at times), Eames didn’t plan to cast himself into anything resembling the jealous, jilted lover role.

If he’d been a saner man, he would have just switched rooms. It wasn’t like there were no others to choose from; Yusuf slept in a downstairs room in another wing, for fuck’s sake (Another wing? Buildings with multiple wings did not count as cabins, he was sure.) A saner man would easily have switched rooms. Of course, he was a man who regularly fucked mental projections of his friends and enemies, so being overly involved with his friends’ love life was probably par for the course.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t thrilled when Ariadne’s murmurings and Arthur’s chuckle turned into Ariadne’s disappointed sigh and Arthur’s awkward silence. (Really, Arthur? Despite all evidence, you might actually be human!) A man did deserve his sleep after all.

He managed to drift off into that hazy world between dreams and reality when Ariadne’s delighted gasp awoke him to the fact that maybe Arthur did have some imagination after all.

-

Dream Cobb was happy and laughed a lot. There were, of course, moments when it crossed Eames’s mind that these projections he made could be nothing more than wish-fulfillment and not his unconscious spitting out its analysis of a person’s psyche, but he always dismissed them. Always, save for Cobb. It was nothing more than sheer bloody fantasy that Cobb smiled and laughed the whole time they were frolicking on the summer grass, but he savored it. Cobb needed to feel happy and loved again, and while the thought of actually taking Mal’s place would have disgusted Eames if he’d ever thought of it, in his dreams Cobb was happy and safe and in love again. It didn’t matter with whom, and Eames never pretended that it was with him. Just, Cobb’s natural state was ‘in love’ and it was wrong when he wasn’t.

-

Eames had been the one to approach the others about the job. Hanneli Moser was very rich and very beautiful, despite being very old, and was convinced that her equally rich and equally old husband was cheating on her. Private investigators had found no proof of it.

Neither had Arthur, during his background research. Neither had Eames, during his stint as the Mosers’ chef. (Hanneli had accidentally spilled hot oil down the old chef’s front, but luckily there was that nice young man who was renting the Bachmanns' cabin with his friends, and she’d heard that he absolutely loved to cook. Wasn’t that convenient? Maybe they could hire him, just for a bit, while poor Gustav recovered from his wounds.)

(The team were all terrified of her.)

It was just Eames, Arthur, Ariadne and Yusuf this time. Cobb refused to be separated from his children, even for the hefty payday that the Moser job promised. Yusuf had been almost the same, loath to leave his clinic and dreamers once again. It had only been each of the others kicking in a third of their shares before he’d agreed to come. Actually, Eames had been all for leaving Yusuf out of it, but Arthur had overruled him.

“Andreas Moser is ninety-six and on seven different heart medicines,” Arthur had said, flatly. “Does his wife care if we accidentally kill him? Yes? Then go get Yusuf.”

And so Yusuf was got, with Eames trotting across the globe in time to Arthur’s barked orders. Funny how even when he found the jobs, Eames rarely wound up in charge of them.

-

Dream Arthur and Dream Ariadne together were a bit kinky. When Eames first imagined them, she’d used a tie to tie Arthur’s hands to the headboard and one of her scarves to blindfold him. As Eames watched, she gave the squirming Arthur a blow job that looked like it was to die for.

Normally Eames didn’t do threesomes or foursomes or moresomes, at least in his dreams, for a variety of reasons. It was harder to focus on the psychology of the individual when there were multiple individuals to pay attention to; plus, he could see an orgy with his projections getting a little confusing and out of hand. The one other time he’d tried it with two others, he’d felt the need to add a third. A third had opened the door to a fourth, the fourth to a fifth, and before he’d realized it, the projections were running wild and his whole dream world was engaged in the orgy. Mr Eames had a wild imagination, but turning around to see a projection of his dead Granny tossing Dream Browning’s salad had put him off his feed for days.

He made an exception for Dream Arthur and Dream Ariadne because they were based upon the real Arthur and Ariadne, who were (and he would die before admitting this to Arthur) two people he was genuinely fond of, and it was becoming as wrong to separate them as it would have been to take Mal’s place with Cobb.

That, and it was fascinating to see the change in them: Arthur was full of lots of gentle smiles and laughter and for a moment Eames wondered if he’d started to wander into that same wish-fulfillment area with Arthur that he did with Cobb. No, he decided. There had definitely been a relaxed air about the Arthurbot at breakfast.

Ariadne was different, too. Less focused solely on her job, less dreamy, less shy. It took him a moment to realize it, but the thing that had changed the most? They weren’t in some grand chateau or hanging from the towers of a suspension bridge or on the edge of the roof of a fucking skyscraper. They were in her room in the cabin, with its narrow bed that squeaked far too loudly.

Eames nudged her out of the way and she grinned, moving her way up to demand that Arthur return the favor she just gave him.

While Arthur was enthusiastically eating his girlfriend out, Eames dreamed up a bottle of lube and, because he feared for Arthur’s delicate sensibilities even when Arthur was only Dream Arthur, a box of condoms. Eames was prepared to eat his nonexistent hat if his subconscious could call up a projection of Arthur, even a relaxed, blindfolded, bound, bisexual, threesome-friendly one, reacting nonchalantly to Eames’s shit on his dick.

-

They’d already broken into the Moser household once. They’d already put Andreas Moser under once. They’d already tried to perform extraction on him once.

All they’d found of his secrets was that his millions were not from logging but from smuggling, and that he’d been quite a playboy in his youth. There had been absolutely no sign of an affair, but since the mark had also spent most of the dream trying to wander off and fall asleep in corners, they couldn’t be absolutely sure of that.

They’d still gone ahead and told Hanneli what they’d found, though. She hadn’t taken the news well, and had come up with a new plan, one to get around her husband’s fuzzy-mindedness. The group would incept him:

“I want him to love me best,” she’d said in hard, perfect English. “I want you to plant the idea in his mind that no matter who else he has on the side, he loves me best.”

-

Dream Fischer had been a nervous, virginal type. Eames had laughed at first, because he’d once read a trashy gay porn novel that described the situation perfectly, down to the “quavering love” and “wide blue eyes that started out fearful but then grew easy with debauchery”. Then he’d abruptly stopped laughing, because this was a dream, wasn’t it, and who was to say that his mind hadn’t taken that very novel and substituted Robert Fischer in for the cringing virgin?

And lord, sometimes he was lonely, but really, the dream sex wasn’t just about that.

-

None of them knew how Hanneli had found out about inception. Maybe there was a newsletter that billionaires were sent. It would explain Saito, anyway. Luckily, someone had carefully intercepted Fischer’s if that were the case.

They all thought Hanneli was crazy. No, never doubt that Eames did too, because he was certain she was. He just pitied her more than they did. She was an old woman, very old, who had lived through the births of her children and the deaths of her children and wars and wars and love and almost as many years as Eames imagined Limbo contained and now her husband was withdrawing from her. It was easier for her to think that he was cheating on her, playboy that he once was, than for her to admit that her beloved husband’s mind was going, and that even if she died first, she might be dying alone.

“This one won’t be easy,” Ariadne had said as they sat around and stared at their easel. “Convincing Fischer to break up his company played on feelings that were already there. This...” she trailed off and waved her hand vaguely to indicate the easel, the cabin, the mountains, Switzerland, the entire practice of inception and extraction and possibly her yogurt as well. “This is more complicated.”

“Plus, the man is ninety-six,” Yusuf said. “We already put him under once; doing it again so soon after could be very taxing to his system.”

Arthurbot didn’t say anything, he just brooded and occasionally looked at Eames, who considered what the weather would be like in Miami this time of year.

“No,” said Eames, softly. “I think the feelings are there. I think we just need to get him to show them more, and we need to get her to recognize those signs for what they are.”

“You want us to incept her, too?” Arthurbot said incredulously.

“Yes.”

“That can’t be—“

“Spare me your ‘it can’t be dones,’ Arthur,” Eames said. “You just lack the imagination to do it.”

Ariadne leaned forward a bit in her chair. “I bet it could be done. We just need to take her with us.”

-

Dream Yusuf would have put Dionysius to shame. Eames had known the man for quite a while, and knew what he could get up to. Hell, the first time they’d met had been when they’d escaped to a balcony for air and had ended up trash-talking the massive orgy inside for its lack of imagination and attractive participants and, well, ventilation.

They’d never actually had sex in real life, though, because Yusuf only liked men when women were also involved, and didn’t like seeing his sex partners again after the fact.

After having sex with Dream Yusuf, Eames is a bit relieved that the closest they’d ever come to sex was being on opposite sides of an orgy. Dream Yusuf’s “chamber of love”, as he called it, was an overwhelming place. There was dim lighting and incense and dildos of all shapes and sizes, even a godforsaken bearskin rug. Yes, he did fuck Yusuf on the bearskin rug.

They’d gone, as far as Eames could tell through the Ecstasy that Dream Yusuf quite thoroughly dosed him with, at least four times, and the man was still licking his lips and doing that eyes half-closed dreamy smile he did whenever he was thinking about sex. The man had to be insatiable.

Eames briefly pondered setting him up with Arthur.

-

There would only be two levels this time. He couldn’t help but worry that it might not be deep enough, but Yusuf had vetoed the idea. “Eames, these people, they are both on a ton of medications, any and or all of which could have myriad nasty side effects with the somnacin and the sedatives that I’m giving them. Too deep a sleep could kill them.”

“Hell, they’re in their nineties,” Arthurbot had said from his leaned back chair. “Anything could kill them.”

“Once again, Arthur, you make the most useful contributions,” Eames snapped. “But two levels should work just fine, because the feelings they have for each other are already there and they just need help in seeing them.”

Yusuf would stay out and watch the bodies, especially the two Moslers. Level one would be Arthur’s, as usual.

In Level one, they’d plant the ideas: he loves me still/I need to show her. An elegant ballroom with an 8-piece band playing: the night that the Moslers had first met.

Level two would be Eames’s, where they’d drive the point home. Another hospital. Eames hated hospitals, but the emotions they called up worked well for this sort of thing.

As long as no one died in their sleep, they should be fine.

Once again, he considered turning his back on all of this: the plan, the cabin, the team, the job, the lifestyle, and possibly even Ariadne’s yogurt.

The three-day blizzard was the only thing stopping him. Well, that and the fact that Hanneli Mosler, ninety-five years old and wheelchair bound or not, would probably track him down and have him tortured and killed. So, the blizzard, Hanneli Mosler, and the fact that if he bailed on them Arthurbot would probably shoot him the face. Alright, the blizzard, Hanneli Mosler, Arthur’s gun, and an odd sense of devotion to this job and to the team.

He’d never really expected that last part.

-

Dream Saito was warm and kind, but not highly attentive. Eames’d had enough sex where one or both of the parties were bored or distracted that he could recognize it before it began. The handjob from Saito was perfunctory and almost polite.

Eames had never had polite sex in his life. Not even in his dream life. Not even that time when he was sixteen years old and his mother was in the other room and he’d been afraid she would burst in and lecture him about his manners and ‘At least give him a kiss before you fuck him!’

She’d never actually said that, thankfully, but after that nasty trick she’d pulled with his dead Granny, he definitely hadn’t trusted her anywhere near his sex life.

He reached his hand down into Dream Saito’s pants to return the favor and hopefully finish the man off before a projection of his mother burst in and lectured him about his manners, but Dream Saito shifted uncomfortably.

“You don’t have to.” Easily the politest rejection that Eames had ever come across, with the inflection perfect to indicate that while Saito has no objections to sex with Eames and would actually enjoy it quite a bit, but that it was completely unnecessary at this point and Saito would be just as content to sit back and watch TV.

Eames had never enjoyed rejection, especially not from his projections. He shifted the dream and went looking for Dream Ariadne and Dream Arthur, leaving Dream Saito to think about business or politics or maybe even the wife he’d been cheating on for years.

-

The ballroom suited the team. Aesthetically, that was. Arthur looked as dashing as always in his immaculately cut tuxedo (Eames had tried to come up with a plan that involved Arthur wandering around in a grungy vest and torn jeans, but he couldn’t think of a way to end it that didn’t end with him getting shot in the face). Ariadne was gorgeous in a slinky black ballgown and radiant smile, and the two of them were grinning like idiots at each other. It was adorable, it really was, the goofy grin she gave him and the way he forgot to be graceful and ended up stepping on her foot.

Eames was wearing Leonie, the woman who’d introduced the two Moslers. They hadn’t bothered to tell Hanneli about this part of the plan, so she thought Eames was lurking about somewhere and her friend, or at least a projection of her friend, really was at her side. She looked even older in the dreams than she did in real life. He felt another stab of pity for the old woman, lost and alone.

He’d deny it thoroughly if anyone ever asked, but some people were obviously meant to settle down with someone and be happy, and Eames liked to see those couples get what they deserved.

And there was Andreas now, wandering in on his own, looking as lost and befuddled as ever. Lost until his eyes lit upon his projection of Hanneli, smoldering away in a daringly low-cut red dress, anyway. Luckily Ariadne remembered her job and intercepted the old man just in time. As she laughed and schmoozed and the real Hanneli’s face went cold and thin, a young Andreas strode through the door.

“He’s paying so much attention to that girl,” Hanneli complained querulously. “I wish he’d pay that much attention to me.”

“Shhh,” Leonie said, pointing to the center of the room. “Look, he is!” And a projection of Leonie was introducing young Andreas to young Hanneli. And the music stopped, and all the faces in the room turned toward Eames.

-

Dream Nash had cried a lot and needed a lot of cuddling. It wasn’t that Eames didn’t understand psychological trauma or that he was an unfeeling person, but that had been the single most awkward and uncomfortable moment of his life (yes, even counting that time with Arthur and Mal in Reykjavík after the boat trip), and it hadn’t even been real.

-

“How come there are two of you?” asked Hanneli, angry suspicion in her voice.

“We’re in a dream, remember?” Leonie said brightly. “I’m your projection of me, and that’s his projection of me.”

Ariadne was saying something to Andreas with a quick laugh, but it wasn’t really necessary. After a moment, his attention had drifted again and the projections turned their attention back to the party.

It wasn’t pleasant, sitting here talking to Hanneli. He’d much rather be getting drunk with Andreas, like Ariadne was, but Hanneli required a delicate touch. He was still searching for his opening when his opening walked in. On seven feet.

“What is that?!”

“It’s a dream, Hanneli,” Leonie said patiently. Leonie was always patient, Hanneli had said. Not a bad bone in her body. That, and an old picture, hadn’t been much to go on, but Hanneli was hard of hearing and almost blind, not to mention more than a little bit crazy.

“I thought these dreams were supposed to be structured, coherent. Not with seven-legged orange dogs that no one notices.”

And there it was.

“Hanneli, we’re in your husband’s mind. Do you really think he’d notice a seven-legged orange dog these days?”

“Of course he would! He’s a very observant man!”

“Hmmm.” Leonie paused to think for a moment. “Let me reword that. Hanneli, do you really think that he’d notice that a seven-legged orange dog was something unusual?”

The old woman’s jaw worked a bit, but she didn’t say anything. She just turned her attention back to the couple dancing in the middle of the floor.

-

Dream Anabelle had been a complete and utter waste of his time. He’d seen her once, across the way at a crowded bar. She’d been flirting with men and picking their pockets and he’d been a bit entranced.

Not that he’d talked to her. Or even knew what her name really was. He’d just felt that kinship. He flirted with men and picked their pockets.

So he’d adopted her face and voice as one of his aliases, and she’d served him well enough for that, but sex in the dream world just didn’t work. There was too much of him in his perception of her, and it had grown very boring very quickly. All his sex while using the PASIV was nothing more than glorified masturbation, but this one was particularly so.

A little bit angry and a little bit depressed, Eames had let her vanish and then called up a picture of Ariadne and Arthur. She had him shoved up against a wall in Osaka’s Church of the Light and was that a strap-on?

God, Eames thought as she beckoned him closer, I love those two.

-

The hospital was brightly both from the inside and the outside. Clean white light from above mixed with warm sunlight filtering from the garden. It was possibly the most pleasant hospital Eames had ever been in.

Despite all logic that said he should not be able to fall asleep within a somnacin dream, Andreas Mosler was lying in a hospital bed snoring. His wife lay in the bed next to him, watching her husband with sad eyes.

Eames stood in the doorway, dressed as an orderly, and watched her watching him. They really hadn’t had to plant a seed; she’d known all along that he was no longer there.

That didn’t really mean much though, did it? Lonely was still lonely.

He cleared his throat as he came in, and right on cue, Andreas opened his eyes.

“Anything I can get for either of you?” he asked, loudly because he suspected that Andreas was more than a little deaf.

Hanneli just shook her head, her eyes shining with tears. Eames wondered if she was planning on having them killed when they woke up, or if she was just planning on withholding payment.

“Er.” The voice was weak, and unfamiliar, and it took Eames a minute to realize that Andreas was speaking.

“Can you push my bed up against my wife’s?” the old man asked.

And so Eames nodded, and beckoned Ariadne into the room, and they pushed the beds together, and then they turned the beds so that they couple could look out the window, because it seemed like a nice touch.

As Ariadne stared at them, Eames slowly backed out of the room. It didn’t take an idiot to imagine what she was thinking, and she didn’t need him hovering over her shoulder. Hell, this job was so sappy that he was feeling more than a bit sentimental himself.

When she looked up though, her eyes were dry and practical. _Non, rien de rien. . . ._

“Think we’ll get paid for this one?” she asked as she set the charges.

“We’d better,” he answered, waiting for the kick to bring him back up. “Yusuf will never forgive us if we don’t.”

-

They were at it again. Seven times in one night was not human, no matter if Eames was pretty sure that Arthur had stopped being able to get hard several turns ago and one of those times had surely been Ariadne by herself, because he’d heard Arthur’s faint snores.

Evidence for Arthurbot was beginning to stack up again. Evidence that Ariadne was even more frightening than Hanneli Moser was also mounting. They deserved each other, they did: the woman who apparently needed more than any one human man should be able to give and the one man he’d always suspected might not actually be human.

A particularly loud bang against the wall sent his bedside water glass to shatter on the floor.

That was it. “WILL. YOU. TWO.” He shouted, forgetting his promise to himself to encourage nerdy, non-repressed sex. “BE. QUIET!”

The banging on the wall stopped, to be replaced with hushed whispers. Then Arthurbot’s sheepish, “Sorry about that, Eames.”

And they tried; he could tell they really did. When they started up again, an hour or so later, Ariadne’s shrieks were muffled, as if she’d shoved a pillow over her face. Well, that was stupid, wasn’t it? He could still hear them and now she was running the risk of suffocating.

That was really it. He got out of bed, wrapping himself in his duvet, and started on the trek to the room next door.

He didn’t even knock.

Ariadne was sprawled on the bed, one arm lazily holding a pillow over her face. Arthur was nowhere to be seen, until you looked closely and noticed that Ariadne’s lower half seemed quite large under the covers. Neither one really acknowledged him when he came in.

Right.

“Do you two not have any manners?” he shouted at them. “Either be quiet or invite me to join in! Just stop torturing me with all the noise! It’s only polite!”

And Ariadne took the pillow off of her face and Arthur swam his way up from under the sheets and they both looked at him, then at each other.

And no one said anything at all.

The silence went on just long enough that Eames, king of making other people uncomfortable, started to feel a bit awkward himself, when Arthur grinned and Ariadne laughed, and they both rolled apart to make room for him.


End file.
